Two survivors of the Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 58 people and left 851 injured, started a foundation to to help those struggling with medical costs and other problems in wake of the shooting. But in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Brian Claypool couldn't help comment on the recent school shooting.
Cuomo noted that when he first met Claypool, the survivor was asking big questions about why he wasn't killed and what he would do with the life he spared.
"Let me tell you this, I'm still very angry about the shooting and as I was dodging bullets and saying to myself, hearing these automatic weapons, poppop poppop pop, I still hear them," Claypool confessed. "I said to myself, 'Man, if I do live, I have got to do something to eliminate assault weapons.'"
He noted the recent shooting in Parkland, Florida reopened a lot of emotional wounds for him.
"I didn't sleep for three nights," he said. "I could not sleep, because I felt the helplessness of those kids in the classrooms, the administrators. We have no chance against assault weapons. Make no mistake about it. I saw your prior guest talking about 'Well, let me look at the proposal for gun control.' Let me speak to the country on this and for myself, as a survivor, you have no chance when you're in a shooting where there's an assault weapon. Chris, I'm telling you, if we don't get gun reform through legislators then -- they already have blood on their hands in my opinion. But then we've got to go through the private sector and Dick's Sporting Goods and I'm going to call distributors, retailers, that's going to be my next mission."
He pledged to personally call every company and ask them not to sell assault weapons.
"I read an article over the weekend, stunning," he continued. "A lot of people don't know that these bullets used in these assault weapons, they are so much more devastating and destructive to your bodies. It's what called yawing. They go into your body, Chris, and they go to the side and they explode inside of your body. I'm still angry because we live in a society, we purport to the world that we are the most civilized society in the world but we're not. We are not, because we allow people access to these destructive weapons and this destructive ammunition that does nothing but ruin lives. It has to stop."
Watch the full interview with Claypool and colleague Lisa Fine below:
